The real context of our lives (off stage) determines who we are, of course, and how we more or less consciously behave. Many artists and writers of every imaginable ideological bent seem to take into account the fact that we are ephemeral beings, acting out a role presented to us by historical circumstances, a role that usually offers a very limited series of choices, but which sometimes catapults us into unexpected activities; and then we must die --not a cherished thought for most of us, but nevertheless true for all . . . .

The 6 items below speak to some of the limitations in the lives of contemporary man and womankind, which it is becoming more and more difficult to ignore, and to humanists who can no longer be paradoxed into silence by instrumentalist thinkers.


Item A. is an article from CEIMSA associate Elisabeth Chamorand on the terrible choices being made by Third World peasants after being faced with U.S. corporate giant Monsanto's decision to monopolize the sale of genetically modified seed grains.

Item B. is an article by Daniel Ellsberg in which he describes "the coup d'état" in the United States.

Item C., sent to us by Professor Herman, is an article by Pepe Escobar on the continuation of Israel's historic crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Item D., is a brief interview with French demographer Emmanuel Todd on "Dr. Kouchner's 'Military-Without-Borders'."

Item E. is a short pod cast from Truthout on the critical increase of war resistance within the U.S. military.

And item F. is an article by Jim Kirwan responding to Daniel Ellsberg's article (please see item B. below): "More on the coup d'état in the United States and the democratic mobilization to resist.


Finally, we would like to draw the attention of CEIMSA's readers to the September 24th Democracy Now ! pod cast featuring a discussion between Naomi Klein, author of "No Logo" and "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,"  and Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006.

Sincerely,
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies
Director of Research
Universit Stendhal Grenoble 3
http://www.ceimsa.org/



___________________
A.
from Elisabeth Chamorand :
Date: 20 September 2007
Subject: Farmer Suicides.
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/62273/

Anyone hearing about central India's ongoing epidemic of farmer suicides, where growers are killing themselves at a terrifying clip, has to be horrified. But among the more disturbed must be the once-grand poobah of post-invasion Iraq, U.S. diplomat L. Paul Bremer.

    Why Bremer? Because Indian farmers are choosing death after finding themselves caught in a loop of crop failure and debt rooted in genetically modified and patented agriculture - the same farming model that Bremer introduced to Iraq during his tenure as administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American body that ruled the "new Iraq" in its chaotic early days.

    In his 400 days of service as CPA administrator, Bremer issued a series of directives known collectively as the "100 Orders." Bremer's orders set up the building blocks of the new Iraq, and among them is Order 81 [PDF], officially titled Amendments to Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety Law, enacted by Bremer on April 26, 2004.

    Order 81 generated very little press attention when it was issued. And what coverage it did spark tended to get the details wrong. Reports claimed that what the United States' man in Iraq had done was no less than tell each and every Iraqi farmer - growers who had been tilling the soil of Mesopotamia for thousands of years - that from here on out they could not reuse seeds from their fields or trade seeds with their neighbors, but instead they would be required to purchase all of their seeds from the likes of U.S. agriculture conglomerates like Monsanto.

    That's not quite right. Order 81 wasn't that draconian, and it was not so clearly a colonial mandate. In fact, the edict was more or less a legal tweak.

    What Order 81 did was to establish the strong intellectual property protections on seed and plant products that a company like the St. Louis-based Monsanto - purveyors of genetically modified (GM) seeds and other patented agricultural goods - requires before they'll set up shop in a new market like the new Iraq. With these new protections, Iraq was open for business. In short, Order 81 was Bremer's way of telling Monsanto that the same conditions had been created in Iraq that had led to the company's stunning successes in India.

    In issuing Order 81, Bremer didn't order Iraqi farmers to march over to the closest Monsanto-supplied shop and stock up. But if Monsanto's experience in India is any guide, he didn't need to.

    Here's the way it works in India. In the central region of Vidarbha, for example, Monsanto salesmen travel from village to village touting the tremendous, game-changing benefits of Bt cotton, Monsanto's genetically modified seed sold in India under the Bollgard label. The salesmen tell farmers of the amazing yields other Vidarbha growers have enjoyed while using their products, plastering villages with posters detailing "True Stories of Farmers Who Have Sown Bt Cotton." Old-fashioned cotton seeds pale in comparison to Monsanto's patented wonder seeds, say the salesmen, as much as an average old steer is humbled by a fine Jersey cow.

    Part of the trick to Bt cotton's remarkable promise, say the salesmen, is that Bollgard was genetically engineered in the lab to contain bacillus thuringiensis, a bacterium that the company claims drastically reduces the need for pesticides. When pesticides are needed, Bt cotton plants are Roundup Ready - a Monsanto designation meaning that the plants can be drowned in the company's signature herbicide, none the worse for wear. (Roundup mercilessly kills nonengineered plants.)

    Sounds great, right? The catch is that Bollgard and Roundup cost real money. And so Vidarbha's farmers, somewhat desperate to grow the anemic profit margin that comes with raising cotton in that dry and dusty region, have rushed to both banks and local moneylenders to secure the cash needed to get on board with Monsanto. Of a $3,000 bank loan a Vidarbha farmer might take out, as much as half might go to purchasing a growing season's worth of Bt seeds.

    And the same goes the next season, and the next season after that. In traditional agricultural, farmers can recycle seeds from one harvest to plant the next, or swap seeds with their neighbors at little or no cost. But when it comes to engineered seeds like Bt cotton, Monsanto owns the tiny speck of intellectual property inside each hull, and thus controls the patent. And a farmer wishing to reuse seeds from a Monsanto plant must pay to relicense them from the company each and every growing season.

    But farmers who chose to bet the farm, literally, on Bt cotton or other GM seeds aren't necessarily crazy or deluded. Genetically modified agricultural does hold the tremendous promise of leading to increased yields - incredibly important for farmers feeding their families and communities from limited land and labor.

    But when it comes to GM seeds, all's well when all is well. Farming is a gamble, and the flip side of the great potential reward that genetically modified seeds offer is, of course, great risk. When all goes badly, farmers who have sunk money into Monsanto-driven farming find themselves at the bottom of a far deeper hole than farmers who stuck with traditional growing. Farmers who suffer a failed harvest may find it nearly impossible to secure a new loan from either a bank or local moneylender. With no money to dig him or herself out, that hole only gets deeper.

    And that hole is exactly where farmers have found themselves in India's Vidarbha region, where crop failure - especially the failure of Bt cotton crops - has reached the level of pandemic.

    In may be that Bt cotton isn't well-suited to central India's rain-driven farming methods; Bollgard and parched Vidarbha may be as ill-suited as Bremer's combat boots and Brooks Brothers suits. It may be the unpredictable and unusually dry monsoon seasons that have plagued India of late. But in any case, the result is that more and more of India's farmers are finding themselves in debt, and with little hope for finding their way out.

    And the final way out that so many of them - thousands upon thousands - have chosen is death, and by their own hands. Firm statistics are difficult to come by, but even numbers on the low end of the scale are downright horrifying. The Indian government and NGOs have estimated that, so far this year, at last count more than a thousand farmers have killed themselves in the state of Maharashtra alone. The New York Times pinned it as 17,000 Indian farmers in 2003 alone. A PBS special that aired last month, called "The Dying Fields," claimed that one farmer commits suicide in Vidarbha every eight hours.

    But let's not be so pessimistic for a moment, and say that Iraqi farmers see the risks of investing in unproven GM seeds. Let's say they reject the idea that the intellectual property buried inside the seeds they plant is "owned" not by nature, but by Monsanto. Let's say they decide to keep on keeping on with nonengineered, nonpatented agriculture.

    The fact is, they may not have a choice.

    Here is where Order 81 starts to look a lot like the forced and mandatory GM-driven agricultural system that cynics tagged it as when it was first announced. Read the letter of the law, and the impact of Order 81 seems limited to using public policy to construct an architecture that's simply favorable to a company like Monsanto. The directive promotes a corporate agribusiness model a lot like the one we have in the United States today, but it doesn't really and truly put Monsanto in the driver's seat of that system.

    Actually handing the keys to Monsanto is instead biology's job.

    Biology - how so? That's a good question for Percy Schmeiser, the Saskatchewan farmer featured in the film The Future of Food, who found himself tangled with Monsanto in a heated lawsuit over the presence of Roundup Ready canola plants on the margins of his fields.

    The Canadian farmer argued that he had purchased no Monsanto canola seeds, had never planted Monsanto seeds, and was frankly horrified to find that the genetically modified crops had taken hold in his acreage. Perhaps, suggested Schmeiser, the plants in question were the product of a few rogue GM seeds blown from a truck passing by his land?

    Monsanto was uninterested in Schmeiser's theory on how the Roundup Ready plants got there. As far as the company was concerned, Schmeiser was in possession of an agricultural product whose intellectual property belonged to Monsanto. And it didn't matter much how that came to pass.

    Monsanto's interpretation of the impact of seed contamination is, of course, a good one if its goal is to eventually own the rights to the world's seed supply. And that goal may well be in sight. In fact, a 2004 study by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that much of the U.S. seed pool is already contaminated by GM seeds. If that contamination continues unabated, eventually much of the world's seeds could labor under patents controlled by one agribusiness or another.

    In one agricultural realm like Iraq's, GM contamination could in short order give a company like Monsanto a stranglehold over the market. Post-Order 81 Iraqi farmers who want to resist genetically modified seeds and stick to traditional farming methods may not have that choice. Future generations of Iraqi growers may find that one seed shop in Karbala is selling the same patented seeds as every other shop in town.

    And when that happens, what had been a traditional farming community - where financial risk is divided and genetic diversity multiplied through the simple interactions between neighboring farmers - finds itself nothing more than the home to lone farmers caught up in the high-stakes world of international agribusiness.

    It's a world not unfamiliar to former CPA honcho Bremer, if the company he keeps is any indication. Robert Cohen, author of the book Milk A-Z, talks about the Bush administration as the "Monsanto Cabinet."

    Among the many connections between that company and the current White House: Former Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman served on the board of directors of Calgene, a Monsanto subsidiary; one-time Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld had an eight-year stint as president of Searle, another Monsanto subsidiary; Clarence Thomas worked as an attorney in Monsanto's pesticide and agriculture division before coming to the Supreme Court as a George H.W. Bush appointee.

    Those connections, as much as anything else, might help to explain the impetus behind and timing of Order 81. Let's suppose for a minute that GM-driven globalized agriculture is, indeed, in the long-term best interests of the new Iraq. Even in the best of circumstances, such a significant policy shift in so core an economic sector can be expected to cause short-term pain. When Bremer issued the directive, Iraq was hardly in a good place: It had recently been invaded, its government dismantled. Considering the desperate need for immediate stability in Iraq in April 2004, Order 81 begins to look like the triumph of connections and ideology over clear-headed policymaking.

    In India, seed activists like Vandana Shiva are working to weaken the connection between that world of U.S. agribusiness and the farmers in villages and towns across India. Shiva, featured in the PBS special The Dying Fields, implores local farmers to stop forking over their money to commercial seed producers and return to the days of homegrown seeds. While Monsanto sells seeds that become India's corn, rice, potatoes, and tomatoes, it's cotton where Monsanto is king, as Shiva well knows. "You have become addicted to Bt cotton," she chides farmers. Though if the perpetuation of the GMO-seed/crop-failure cycle is any indication, few Indian farmers are listening.

    Will Iraqi farmers making their way in the new post-Order 81 agricultural world fare any better? Maybe. Can they manage to reap the benefits of genetically modified farming, trading their newfound dependence on Monsanto and other corporate behemoths for the increased yield their patented and IP-protected seeds promise? Hopefully.

    But it's possible that Iraq's farmers will indeed find themselves in the same predicament that India's farmers have ended up in - a world where growers no longer rely upon their fields and their communities to meet their needs but in a world in which, when hard times strike, the only way out seems like the final exit. A world in which, in a twist perhaps worthy of Shakespeare, the farmer borrows one last time from whatever bank or moneylender will hand over a few last rupees, buys one last bottle of Roundup, and - as has happened so many times in India - ends it all by drinking it down.

    Monsanto to the end.

    ----------
 Nancy Scola is a Brooklyn-based writer and chief blogger for Air America. Before focusing fully on writing, Nancy served on Capitol Hill under Rep. Henry Waxman of California and was an aide to former Governor Mark Warner as he explored a run for the presidency.


__________________
B.
from Edward Herman:
Date: 26 September 2007
Subject: 'A Coup Has Occurred'
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18456.htm

I think nothing has higher priority than averting an attack on Iran, which I think will be accompanied by a further change in our way of governing here that in effect will convert us into what I would call a police state.

If theres another 9/11 under this regime it means that they switch on full extent all the apparatus of a police state that has been patiently constructed, largely secretly at first but eventually leaked out and known and accepted by the Democratic people in Congress, by the Republicans and so forth.

Will there be anything left for NSA to increase its surveillance of us?   They may be to the limit of their technical capability now, or they may not. But if theyre not now they will be after another 9/11.

And I would say after the Iranian retaliation to an American attack on Iran, you will then see an increased attack on Iran an escalation which will be also accompanied by a total suppression of dissent in this country, including detention camps.

Its a little hard for me to distinguish the two contingencies; they could come together. Another 9/11 or an Iranian attack in which Irans reaction against Israel, against our shipping, against our troops in Iraq above all, possibly in this country, will justify the full panoply of measures that have been prepared now, legitimized, and to some extent written into law. 

This is an unusual gang, even for Republicans. [But] I think that the successors to this regime are not likely to roll back the assault on the Constitution. They will take advantage of it, they will exploit it.

Will Hillary Clinton as president decide to turn off NSA after the last five years of illegal surveillance? Will she deprive her administration her ability to protect United States citizens from possible terrorism by blinding herself and deafening herself to all that NSA can provide? I dont think so.

Unless this somehow, by a change in our political climate, of a radical change, unless this gets rolled back in the next year or two before a new administration comes in and theres no move to do this at this point unless that happens I dont see it happening under the next administration, whether Republican or Democratic.

The Next Coup

Let me simplify this and not just to be rhetorical: A coup has occurred. I woke up the other day realizing, coming out of sleep, that a coup has occurred. Its not just a question that a coup lies ahead with the next 9/11. Thats the next coup, that completes the first.

The last five years have seen a steady assault on every fundamental of our Constitution, what the rest of the world looked at for the last 200 years as a model and experiment to the rest of the world in checks and balances, limited government, Bill of Rights, individual rights protected from majority infringement by the Congress, an independent judiciary, the possibility of impeachment.

There have been violations of these principles by many presidents before. Most of the specific things that Bush has done in the way of illegal surveillance and other matters were done under my boss Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War: the use of CIA, FBI, NSA against Americans.

I could go through a list going back before this century to Lincolns suspension of habeas corpus in the Civil War, and before that the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 18th century. I think that none of those presidents were in fact what I would call quite precisely the current administration: domestic enemies of the Constitution.

I think that none of these presidents with all their violations, which were impeachable had they been found out at the time and in nearly every case their violations were not found out until they were out of office so we didnt have the exact challenge that we have today.

That was true with the first term of Nixon and certainly of Johnson, Kennedy and others. They were impeachable, they werent found out in time, but I think it was not their intention to in the crisis situations that they felt justified their actions, to change our form of government.

It is increasingly clear with each new book and each new leak that comes out, that Richard Cheney and his now chief of staff David Addington have had precisely that in mind since at least the early 70s. Not just since 1992, not since 2001, but have believed in Executive government, single-branch government under an Executive president elected or not with unrestrained powers. They did not believe in restraint.

When I say this Im not saying they are traitors. I dont think they have in mind allegiance to some foreign power or have a desire to help a foreign power. I believe they have in their own minds a love of this country and what they think is best for this country but what they think is best is directly and consciously at odds with what the Founders of this country and Constitution thought.

They believe we need a different kind of government now, an Executive government essentially, rule by decree, which is what were getting with signing statements. Signing statements are talked about as line-item vetoes which is one [way] of describing them which are unconstitutional in themselves, but in other ways are just saying the president says I decide what I enforce. I decide what the law is. I legislate.

Its [the same] with the military commissions, courts that are under the entire control of the Executive Branch, essentially of the president. A concentration of legislative, judicial, and executive powers in one branch, which is precisely what the Founders meant to avert, and tried to avert and did avert to the best of their ability in the Constitution.

Founders Had It Right

Now Im appealing to that as a crisis right now not just because it is a break in tradition but because I believe in my heart and from my experience that on this point the Founders had it right.

Its not just our way of doing things it was a crucial perception on the corruption of power to anybody including Americans. On procedures and institutions that might possibly keep that power under control because the alternative was what we have just seen, wars like Vietnam, wars like Iraq, wars like the one coming.

That brings me to the second point. This Executive Branch, under specifically Bush and Cheney, despite opposition from most of the rest of the branch, even of the cabinet, clearly intends a war against Iran which even by imperialist standards, standards in other words which were accepted not only by nearly everyone in the Executive Branch but most of the leaders in Congress. The interests of the empire, the need for hegemony, our right to control and our need to control the oil of the Middle East and many other places. That is consensual in our establishment.

But even by those standards, an attack on Iran is insane. And I say that quietly, I dont mean it to be heard as rhetoric. Of course its not only aggression and a violation of international law, a supreme international crime, but it is by imperial standards, insane in terms of the consequences.

Does that make it impossible? No, it obviously doesnt, it doesnt even make it unlikely.

That is because two things come together that with the acceptance for various reasons of the Congress Democrats and Republicans and the public and the media, we have freed the White House the president and the vice president from virtually any restraint by Congress, courts, media, public, whatever.

And on the other hand, the people who have this unrestrained power are crazy. Not entirely, but they have crazy beliefs.

And the question is what then, what can we do about this? We are heading towards an insane operation. It is not certain. It is likely. I want to try to be realistic myself here, to encourage us to do what we must do, what is needed to be done with the full recognition of the reality. Nothing is impossible.

What Im talking about in the way of a police state, in the way of an attack on Iran is not certain. Nothing is certain, actually. However, I think it is probable, more likely than not, that in the next 15, 16 months of this administration we will see an attack on Iran. Probably. Whatever we do.

And we will not succeed in moving Congress probably, and Congress probably will not stop the president from doing this. And thats where were heading. Thats a very ugly, ugly prospect.

However, I think its up to us to work to increase that small perhaps anyway not large possibility and probability to avert this within the next 15 months, aside from the effort that we have to make for the rest of our lives.

Restoring the Republic

Getting back the constitutional government and improving it will take a long time. And I think if we dont get started now, it wont be started under the next administration.

Getting out of Iraq will take a long time. Averting Iran and averting a further coup in the face of a 9/11, another attack, is for right now, it cant be put off. It will take a kind of political and moral courage of which we have seen very little

We have a really unusual concentration here and in this audience, of people who have in fact changed their lives, changed their position, lost their friends to a large extent, risked and experienced being called terrible names, traitor, weak on terrorism names that politicians will do anything to avoid being called.

How do we get more people in the government and in the public at large to change their lives now in a crisis in a critical way? How do we get Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for example? What kinds of pressures, what kinds of influences can be brought to bear to get Congress to do their jobs? It isnt just doing their jobs. Getting them to obey their oaths of office.

I took an oath many times, an oath of office as a Marine lieutenant, as an official in the Defense Department, as an official in the State Department as a Foreign Service officer. A number of times I took an oath of office which is the same oath office taken by every member of Congress and every official in the United States and every officer in the United States armed services.

And that oath is not to a Commander in Chief, which is not mentioned. It is not to a fuehrer. It is not even to superior officers. The oath is precisely to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States.

Now that is an oath I violated every day for years in the Defense Department without realizing it when I kept my mouth shut when I knew the public was being lied into a war as they were lied into Iraq, as they are being lied into war in Iran.

I knew that I had the documents that proved it, and I did not put it out then. I was not obeying my oath which I eventually came to do.

Ive often said that Lt. Ehren Watada who still faces trial for refusing to obey orders to deploy to Iraq which he correctly perceives to be an unconstitutional and aggressive war is the single officer in the United States armed services who is taking seriously in upholding his oath.

The president is clearly violating that oath, of course. Everybody under him who understands what is going on and there are myriad, are violating their oaths. And thats the standard that I think we should be asking of people.

Congressional Courage

On the Democratic side, on the political side, I think we should be demanding of our Democratic leaders in the House and Senate and frankly of the Republicans that it is not their highest single absolute priority to be reelected or to maintain a Democratic majority so that Pelosi can still be Speaker of the House and Reid can be in the Senate, or to increase that majority.

Im not going to say that for politicians they should ignore that, or that they should do something else entirely, or that they should not worry about that.

Of course that will be and should be a major concern of theirs, but theyre acting like its their sole concern. Which is business as usual. We have a majority, lets not lose it, lets keep it. Lets keep those chairmanships. Exactly what have those chairmanships done for us to save the Constitution in the last couple of years?

I am shocked by the Republicans today that I read in the Washington Post who yesterday threatened a filibuster if we get back habeas corpus. The ruling out of habeas corpus with the help of the Democrats did not get us back to George the First it got us back to before King John 700 years ago in terms of counter-revolution.

We need some way, and Ann Wright has one way, of sitting in, in Conyers office and getting arrested. Ray McGovern has been getting arrested, pushed out the other day for saying the simple words swear him in when it came to testimony.

I think weve got to somehow get home to them [in Congress] that this is the time for them to uphold the oath, to preserve the Constitution, which is worth struggling for in part because its only with the power that the Constitution gives Congress responding to the public, only with that can we protect the world from mad men in power in the White House who intend an attack on Iran.

And the current generation of American generals and others who realize that this will be a catastrophe have not shown themselves they might be people who in their past lives risked their bodies and their lives in Vietnam or elsewhere, like [Colin] Powell, and would not risk their career or their relation with the president to the slightest degree.

That has to change. And its the example of people like those up here who somehow brought home to our representatives that they as humans and as citizens have the power to do likewise and find in themselves the courage to protect this country and protect the world. Thank you.

_____________
Daniel Ellsberg is author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.



___________________
C.
from Edward Herman :
Date: 21 September 2007
Subject: Welcome to Planet Gaza
http://www.atimes.com